Greek Depth Study: Culture and Politics of Athens, c.460-399 BC

The institutions of the radical democracy#

FoundationOCR H407 Component 1 Depth Study (Athens) - the democratic constitutionDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The institutions of Athenian democracy

Fig. 1A system of interlocking bodies: the council prepared, the assembly decided, the courts judged and audited, and only the generals were elected.

The Athenian democracy of this period rested on four institutions. The Ekklesia, the assembly of all adult male citizens, met regularly on the Pnyx hill; any citizen could speak, and it decided policy, war and peace, and passed decrees. The Boule, a council of five hundred chosen by lot, fifty from each of the ten tribes, prepared the assembly's agenda and handled day-to-day administration, with a rotating committee of fifty in permanent session. The law courts, the dikasteria, were manned by large panels drawn from a body of six thousand citizens empanelled annually by lot, and heard both private suits and political prosecutions. Most magistracies were filled by lot for a single year, with the important exception of the ten generals, the strategoi, who were elected and could be re-elected without limit.

The decisive reform that produced this system came in 462/1, when Ephialtes stripped the ancient council of the Areopagus of most of its political powers and transferred them to the council, assembly and courts. Ephialtes was murdered soon afterwards; Pericles, associated with the reform, became the leading figure. Pay for jury service, introduced in this period, made participation possible for citizens who could not otherwise afford a day away from work - a change contemporaries recognised as fundamental, since it converted a formal right into a real one. The system was completed by devices for accountability: magistrates were scrutinised before taking office and audited afterwards, and any citizen could bring a public prosecution.

Citizenship itself was narrowly defined and became narrower. In 451/0 a law associated with Pericles restricted citizenship to those with an Athenian mother as well as an Athenian father. The citizen body excluded women, who had no political rights though they had defined roles in religious life; metics, the resident foreigners who were central to Athenian trade and crafts; and slaves, who were numerous and whose labour underpinned the households and workshops of the city. Democracy at Athens was participation without representation for a minority of the population - which is a description, not a condemnation, and one that any answer should state plainly rather than either ignoring or moralising about.

Two mechanisms show the system's distinctive character. Ostracism allowed the assembly to decide each year whether to hold a vote in which the man receiving most votes, provided a threshold of participation was met, was exiled for ten years without loss of property or status - a way of removing a dangerous individual without a trial. And the graphe paranomon allowed a citizen to prosecute the proposer of a decree on the ground that it was contrary to existing law, which put a legal check on the assembly's own decisions. Together they show a system alert to the dangers of both individual dominance and momentary enthusiasm.

The evidence for how all this worked is uneven in an instructive way. The institutions themselves are well attested by inscribed decrees, which show the formulae of assembly and council business, and by later constitutional writing. But almost every literary account of the democracy in action is written by someone critical of it: Thucydides, sympathetic to Pericles but not to what followed; Plato, hostile; Aristophanes, comic and mocking; and the anonymous pamphlet known as the Old Oligarch, which analyses the democracy with cold and unfriendly acuity. There is no surviving defence of radical democracy by a convinced democrat except the funeral oration Thucydides composes for Pericles - which is itself an ambiguous witness.

Worked example

Using a hostile source constructively

How valuable is the anonymous pamphlet known as the Old Oligarch for understanding Athenian democracy?

Establish what it is
It is a short anonymous work, transmitted among Xenophon's writings, analysing the Athenian political system from a standpoint openly hostile to the democracy - hence the modern nickname. It belongs to the later fifth century, close to the period it describes.
State its argument
Its distinctive move is to concede that the democracy works: it argues that, given that the poor and the rowers are the basis of Athenian naval power, it is entirely logical that they should control the state and benefit from it. Hostility is expressed as explanation rather than abuse.
Draw the value
That structure makes it unusually valuable. Because the author is trying to explain how the system serves the interests of those who run it, he describes mechanisms - pay, the courts, the relationship between naval power and political power - that a friendly source might take for granted.
State the limits
It is a polemical pamphlet by an unknown author; its account is shaped to prove a thesis about class interest, and it cannot be assumed accurate on any specific institution without corroboration from decrees or other writers.
Judge
Conclude that it is of high value as contemporary analysis of the logic connecting empire, navy and democracy, and of limited value as a factual description - a case where a source's hostility makes it more useful, not less.

Result: An evaluation that turns the source's hostility into its analytical strength while restricting the claims it can support.

Typical mistakes

Describing Athenian democracy as representative: citizens decided in person, and only the generals were elected.
Forgetting that almost every literary source on the democracy was written by a critic of it.

Active revision

Explain how a proposal reached a vote in the Athenian assembly, naming each body involved and what it contributed.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Pericles and the politics of the democracy#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Depth Study (Athens) - Pericles and Athenian political lifeDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Athens, 462-399 BC

Fig. 2The arc of the depth study: reform, imperial confidence, war, plague, revolution and the trial of 399 BC.

Pericles held no permanent office and no constitutional supremacy; his position rested on repeated election as one of the ten generals and on his ability to carry the assembly. That is the essential political fact, and it should shape how the whole question of his 'rule' is discussed. Influence in the Athenian system meant persuading several thousand citizens repeatedly, over decades, in an assembly where any citizen could speak against you and where a prosecution could follow a policy failure. Pericles' dominance was therefore an achievement of continuous political skill, not an office.

His policies are visible in three areas. Domestically, he was associated with the reforms that completed the radical democracy - the transfer of Areopagus powers, the introduction of pay for public service, and the citizenship law of 451/0. Imperially, he pursued a firm line: the tribute continued after major fighting with Persia ceased, resources were used at Athens, and revolts were suppressed. Strategically, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, he persuaded the Athenians to abandon Attica to Spartan invasion, bring the rural population inside the walls and rely on the fleet and on imperial revenue - a policy that required extraordinary political authority to impose.

Thucydides' verdict has dominated all later discussion, and it is a verdict rather than a description. He writes that Athens was in name a democracy but in fact came to be ruled by its first citizen; he presents Pericles as able to check the people when they were over-confident and to restore their spirits when they were afraid, in contrast to his successors who competed for popularity. The judgement is coherent and comes from a contemporary of high quality - but it is also an argument for a particular view of politics, sympathetic to leadership by the pre-eminent individual and hostile to the competitive politics that followed. Using it well means presenting it as Thucydides' interpretation and testing it.

The alternative evidence complicates the picture in useful ways. Plutarch's Life of Pericles, though written around AD 100, preserves material from earlier sources, including the political attacks made on Pericles and his associates and the criticism of his spending. Aristophanes and the comic tradition mocked Pericles and his circle, which tells us that his position was contested and could be publicly ridiculed. And Thucydides' own narrative records that Pericles was fined and briefly deposed from office during the plague and the early years of the war before being re-elected - which shows the limits of any individual's control over the assembly.

The politics after Pericles' death in 429 are usually described through the hostile category of the 'demagogue'. Cleon, the most prominent, is presented by Thucydides as violent and by Aristophanes as a vulgar opportunist, and the picture has been influential. It should be handled with care: Cleon's policies - firmness towards the allies, energetic prosecution of the war - were not obviously irrational, and his success at Pylos in 425 was a real achievement. What changed after Pericles was less the quality of leaders than the structure of politics: a war economy, a series of crises, and competition between rivals none of whom could establish the standing Pericles had accumulated over thirty years.

Worked example

Testing an ancient judgement

Assess Thucydides' claim that Athens under Pericles was a democracy in name but rule by one man in fact.

State the claim and its author's standing
Thucydides was a contemporary who served as a general and knew Athenian politics from the inside; his verdict is a considered interpretation offered as part of his explanation of why Athens lost the war.
Argue for the claim
Pericles was elected general repeatedly over many years; he carried the assembly on the most demanding policy imaginable, the abandonment of Attica; and Thucydides presents him as able to resist popular pressure rather than follow it.
Argue against
He held no permanent office; his associates were prosecuted; he was himself fined and removed from the generalship during the plague; and every measure he wanted required an assembly vote. The mechanism of power remained wholly democratic even if one man usually won.
Explain the interpretation
Thucydides' formulation serves his larger argument that Athens failed when leadership passed to men who competed for popularity. The contrast with Pericles is doing analytical work, which is a reason to weigh it rather than simply to accept it.
Judge
Conclude that the claim captures a genuine political reality - the dominance of one persuasive figure - while overstating it as a description of the constitution, since Pericles' authority depended on decisions the demos could and occasionally did reverse.

Result: A judgement that credits the ancient interpretation, tests it against evidence in the same author, and states precisely how far it holds.

Typical mistakes

Writing as though Pericles governed Athens, when every policy had to be carried in the assembly.
Accepting the hostile portrait of Cleon and the 'demagogues' from Thucydides and Aristophanes without noting their standpoints.

Active revision

How far was Athens 'ruled by its first citizen' in the age of Pericles? Draft the paragraph that argues against Thucydides' formulation.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

The Acropolis building programme#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Depth Study (Athens) - the building programme and its fundingDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The building programme: purposes and criticism

Fig. 3One programme serving several purposes at once - which is why it could be defended as piety and attacked as misuse of allied money.

The buildings of the Acropolis were raised in the decades after 447 BC on a site the Persians had sacked in 480, and the decision to rebuild was itself a political statement. The Parthenon, begun in 447 and substantially complete by 432, was a Doric temple of unusual scale and refinement, built to house a colossal statue of Athena in gold and ivory; the architects are named in the tradition as Iktinos and Kallikrates, with the sculptor Pheidias exercising general oversight of the programme. The Propylaia, the monumental gateway, followed from 437; the small temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion, with its porch of maidens, completed the ensemble by the end of the century.

The sculptural programme carried meaning as deliberately as the architecture. The Parthenon's pediments showed the birth of Athena and her contest with Poseidon for Attica; the metopes showed mythological battles - Greeks against centaurs, gods against giants, Greeks against Amazons - which were readily understood as the triumph of order over disorder and, in the context of the recent wars, of Greek over barbarian; and the continuous frieze around the cella showed a procession of Athenians, generally understood as connected with the Panathenaic festival. That a temple frieze should depict contemporary Athenians rather than only myth is itself striking, and it fits a programme that identified the city with its goddess and with victory.

The funding is the central historical controversy, and it must be handled with precision. Athens had access to the tribute of the empire, and after the treasury moved from Delos in 454 a portion of that tribute was recorded as dedicated to Athena. Inscribed building accounts survive that record expenditure on the works, which is exceptionally valuable documentary evidence for the scale of the project and its administration. Plutarch preserves the contemporary criticism - that Athens was gilding herself like a vain woman with money contributed by the allies for the war against Persia - and reports Pericles' reply, that so long as Athens defended the allies she owed them no account of how the money was spent. Whether the tribute directly paid for the temples in the way the criticism implies is debated; what is certain is that imperial revenue made the programme possible and that contemporaries said so.

The programme's domestic significance was as great as its imperial. Plutarch describes it as providing employment across a great range of trades and materials, spreading the city's wealth through the citizen body - a claim that fits the logic of a democracy in which the poor voted, though Plutarch is a late source and the argument may be his or his sources'. Building on this scale also required continuous administrative work by boards of commissioners accountable to the assembly, which is why the inscribed accounts exist. The buildings were thus simultaneously an act of piety, an assertion of empire, a political programme and a public works scheme.

For the examination, the buildings are a superb opportunity to integrate material and literary evidence. The architecture and sculpture survive and can be described directly; the inscribed accounts document cost and process; Plutarch preserves the political argument; Thucydides has Pericles speak in the funeral oration about a city that is an education to Greece. Each of these answers a different question, and a strong answer will say so - using the stones for scale and organisation, the inscriptions for administration and expenditure, and the literary sources for what the programme meant to the people who paid for it and quarrelled about it.

The buildings and their evidence

Fig. 4For this topic the monuments themselves, the inscribed accounts and the literary criticism form three independent lines of evidence.

Worked example

Analysing a monument as evidence

What can the Parthenon and its sculpture tell a historian about Athens in the 440s and 430s BC?

Describe what is there
Begin with the object: an unusually large Doric temple of fine marble, with sculptured pediments, ninety-two metopes and a continuous frieze, housing a colossal chryselephantine statue - an outlay of resources far beyond ordinary temple building.
Read the scale
Scale is evidence in itself. A project of this cost, sustained over fifteen years, demonstrates access to exceptional revenue, an administrative capacity to manage it, and a political will maintained across many annual votes - all of which fits a city at the head of a tribute-paying empire.
Read the imagery
The mythological battles of the metopes present order overcoming disorder in terms a Greek audience would connect with the defeat of Persia, while the frieze places contemporary Athenians in the decoration of their goddess's temple - a claim about the city's relationship to the divine that is unusually direct.
Set it against the texts
Plutarch preserves the accusation that the allies' money was being spent on Athenian display and Pericles' reply; the building accounts show the expenditure being publicly recorded. Together these confirm that contemporaries understood the programme in political as well as religious terms.
State what it cannot show
The monument cannot tell us how ordinary Athenians or the allies felt about it, nor settle the precise flow of funds. It documents what the city asserted, at what cost, and with what iconography - and that is a great deal.

Result: A reading that treats the building as primary evidence for resources, administration and ideology, then uses the texts for the argument it provoked.

Typical mistakes

Asserting flatly that the tribute paid for the Parthenon: the relationship between imperial revenue and building expenditure is more complex and is debated.
Describing the buildings only as art and missing their political and imperial function.

Active revision

How far was the Acropolis building programme an imperial statement rather than an act of religious devotion? Sketch three paragraphs.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The Sophists and Socrates#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Depth Study (Athens) - the intellectual life of AthensDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The intellectual revolution at Athens

Fig. 5Several enquiries converged in one city: rhetorical technique, moral questioning, natural explanation and critical history - and all of them unsettled traditional assumptions.

The Sophists were professional teachers who travelled the Greek world in the second half of the fifth century and made Athens their principal market. They taught, for substantial fees, the skills that mattered in a city where political success depended on persuading assemblies and juries: argument, rhetoric, the analysis of language, and the ability to argue either side of a case. Protagoras of Abdera, the most famous, is credited with the claim that man is the measure of all things, and with the observation that on the gods he could not know whether they existed or not; Gorgias of Leontini was celebrated for a dazzling prose style; Prodicus worked on the precise meanings of words. They were not a school with a doctrine but a profession with a market.

Their significance for Athenian politics and culture was double-edged. On one hand they answered a genuine democratic need: in a system where any citizen could speak, the ability to speak well was power, and the Sophists sold it to those who could pay. On the other hand this made them suspect. Charging fees for wisdom offended traditional expectations; teaching pupils to argue both sides suggested that truth was a matter of technique; and the distinction they explored between nomos - custom or law, what a community has agreed - and physis - nature, what is really the case - could be used to argue that laws and moral rules were mere convention. Conservative Athenians heard in that an attack on the city's gods and its ancestral order.

Socrates belongs in this world and stood apart from it, and the distinction matters for the examination. Like the Sophists he questioned received opinion in public and attracted young men of the leading families; unlike them he took no fees, professed to teach nothing, claimed to know only that he did not know, and pursued definitions of moral terms - courage, piety, justice - rather than rhetorical technique. To the ordinary Athenian, however, the difference may have been invisible: a man who cross-examined citizens in public and made them look foolish resembled a Sophist closely enough, and Aristophanes' Clouds of 423 puts Socrates at the head of a school teaching precisely the argumentative tricks he elsewhere disclaimed.

Socrates wrote nothing, and this creates the sharpest source problem in the depth study - what scholars call the Socratic problem. Everything we have is written by others with agendas of their own. Plato's dialogues present a Socrates who becomes increasingly the vehicle for Plato's own philosophy, so that separating the historical figure from the literary character is genuinely difficult; Xenophon's Socrates is a more conventional and practical moralist, which may reflect Xenophon's own outlook; Aristophanes offers a comic caricature assembled from several intellectual types. None of these is a neutral witness, and any statement about what Socrates actually taught should be framed accordingly.

The intellectual movement of these decades reached well beyond the Sophists and Socrates. Medical writing associated with the Hippocratic tradition sought natural rather than divine explanations of disease; historical writing, in Thucydides above all, applied a comparable rigour to human affairs, explicitly rejecting the mythical and the marvellous; and tragedy staged questions about justice, the gods and the law that the philosophers were asking in prose. It is this convergence - and the fact that it happened in a city at war, in public, in front of thousands - that makes the intellectual history of Athens in this period part of its political history rather than a separate subject.

Worked example

Handling the Socratic problem

How far can we know what Socrates actually taught?

State the problem
Socrates wrote nothing. Every account is by an interested writer: Plato, a devoted pupil who developed his own philosophy through the figure of Socrates; Xenophon, an admirer with practical and conventional concerns; and Aristophanes, a comic poet writing while Socrates was alive.
Look for convergence
Where independent sources agree, confidence rises. All three place him in Athens questioning people in public, associating with young men of prominent families, and being widely known. Plato and Xenophon agree that he took no fees and claimed no expertise to sell.
Identify the divergences
They differ sharply on content: Plato's Socrates pursues definitions and, in later dialogues, expounds positive doctrines that are almost certainly Plato's; Xenophon's is a practical moral adviser; Aristophanes' runs a school of natural speculation and argumentative tricks that the other two explicitly deny.
Explain the divergences
Each divergence follows from purpose: philosophical development, memoir and defence, and comedy respectively. Aristophanes' caricature is nonetheless evidence that a recognisable public image of Socrates as a dangerous intellectual existed in Athens by 423.
Judge
Conclude that we can know with confidence what Socrates did and how he was perceived, and that his method of questioning is well attested; but that any statement of his positive teaching must be attributed to a particular source rather than asserted as historical fact.

Result: A judgement that separates securely attested activity and reputation from contested doctrine, and attributes rather than asserts.

Typical mistakes

Treating the Sophists as a unified school with a shared philosophy rather than a profession of travelling teachers.
Quoting Plato's Socrates as the historical Socrates without acknowledging the Socratic problem.

Active revision

Explain the nomos-physis distinction and give one reason why conservative Athenians found it threatening.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

Drama, festivals and religion in the polis#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Depth Study (Athens) - religion, festivals and dramaDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Drama as a civic institution

Fig. 6Drama at Athens ran on civic machinery: a religious festival, a liturgy paid by the rich, a competition judged by the city, and an audience of citizens.

Athenian drama was a religious and civic institution, not a commercial entertainment. Tragedies and comedies were performed in the theatre of Dionysus at festivals of the god, chiefly the City Dionysia in spring and the Lenaia in winter; plays were entered in a competition, judged, and awarded prizes. The costs of training and equipping a chorus fell on a wealthy citizen appointed as choregos - one of the liturgies by which the rich financed public functions - while the state provided the theatre and the framework. The audience was large and public, and the occasion was framed by ceremonies asserting the city's identity.

The consequence is that drama is evidence for Athenian civic life in a way that modern theatre is not. Tragedy, in the hands of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, staged mythological stories that raised questions about justice, the claims of family against city, the gods' treatment of human beings, and the costs of power - questions with obvious contemporary resonance in a democratic city at war. Old Comedy, above all Aristophanes, went further and named names: it lampooned politicians, generals and intellectuals, staged fantastic solutions to real problems such as the war, and could be strikingly rude about the assembly's decisions in front of the assembly's members.

That freedom is itself a historical fact worth analysing. That Cleon could be savaged on stage while at the height of his influence, and that Socrates could be caricatured in 423, tells us something important about the limits of Athenian political speech - and the licence was not unlimited, since comedy operated within a festival framework and there were periods when restrictions were attempted. Comedy must also be used carefully as evidence: its distortions are deliberate and generic, its targets are chosen for comic effect, and a joke about a politician is evidence that he was prominent and attackable, not that the joke was true.

Religion permeated the political calendar. The Panathenaia, held annually and with special magnificence every fourth year, brought a procession through the city to the Acropolis to present a robe to Athena - the ceremony generally connected with the Parthenon frieze. The Eleusinian Mysteries, administered by Athens, offered initiates a promise about the afterlife and were protected by strict secrecy. Sacrifice, oath and consultation of oracles accompanied public business at every level; the assembly's decisions could be affected by omens, and generals sacrificed before battle. There was no separation of religion from politics, because the city and its cults were the same community.

The events of 415 BC show how sharply religion could bite. On the eve of the Sicilian Expedition the Herms - stone markers standing at doorways and crossroads - were mutilated across the city overnight, and accusations followed that the Eleusinian Mysteries had been profaned in private houses. The affair produced denunciations, exiles and executions, and Alcibiades was recalled from the expedition to face charges, whereupon he defected to Sparta. Whatever the truth about who did what, the episode demonstrates that religious offence was understood as an attack on the community and could destroy political careers - context that is essential for understanding the charges brought against Socrates sixteen years later.

Worked example

Evaluating comedy as evidence

Assess the value of Aristophanes' comedies for an enquiry into Athenian attitudes to the Peloponnesian War.

Establish the genre's rules
Old Comedy was performed at a religious festival in competition, aimed at winning a prize from judges before a mass audience. Its methods were exaggeration, obscenity, fantasy and personal abuse; success required jokes the audience would enjoy, not accuracy.
State what follows for evidence
A joke works only if the audience recognises its target and the assumption behind it. So comedy is strong evidence for what was widely known and what could safely be said in public - the existence of war-weariness, the prominence of particular politicians, familiar complaints about the assembly and the courts.
State the limits
It is weak evidence for what actually happened, for what any individual believed, or for the balance of opinion, since the poet's purpose is comic effect and his own views are not straightforwardly recoverable from a fantastic plot.
Test against other evidence
Where a comic theme matches something attested elsewhere - the strain of the annual invasions, the pressure of the war on the countryside, the prominence of Cleon - the two together are stronger than either alone; where comedy stands alone, it supports a claim about attitudes rather than events.
Judge
Conclude that Aristophanes is highly valuable as evidence for the range of publicly expressible attitudes and for the political culture that tolerated them, and of limited value as a record of events or of any individual's real conduct.

Result: A judgement that assigns comedy its proper evidential role - attitudes and political culture - and refuses it the role of factual record.

Typical mistakes

Reading a comic caricature as straightforward evidence about a real individual's opinions or conduct.
Separating religion from politics at Athens, when cult, festival and public business were one system.

Active revision

How useful is Aristophanes as evidence for Athenian political attitudes? Write one paragraph for and one against.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Athens in crisis: plague, oligarchy and the trial of Socrates#

AdvancedOCR H407 Component 1 Depth Study (Athens) - the crisis years and the trial of SocratesDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Why Socrates was condemned

Fig. 7Several long-running grievances converged on a single trial - and the amnesty of 403 helps explain why they took the form of a religious charge.

The crisis began with the plague. Thucydides, who caught the disease and recovered, describes its arrival in the crowded city in 430, its symptoms, and above all its social effects: the collapse of customary burial, of religious observance and of restraint, since men who expected to die soon saw no reason to defer pleasure or fear the law. His account is one of the finest pieces of observation in ancient literature and is unusually valuable precisely because it is descriptive rather than moralising. The plague killed a large part of the population - Thucydides gives figures for some units - and it removed Pericles in 429, leaving the war to a political system under extreme strain.

Military catastrophe followed. The Sicilian Expedition of 415-413 destroyed a fleet and an army, and with them the reserves of confidence and manpower on which the empire rested. Thucydides' verdict on the decision is severe, and he connects it with the political culture that followed Pericles. The consequences at home were immediate: the loss made Athens' allies willing to revolt, brought Persia into the war on the Spartan side, and created the conditions in which those who had always doubted the democracy could argue that it had failed.

In 411 the democracy was overthrown. A movement among the wealthier citizens, exploiting the crisis and promising Persian support, replaced the constitution with a council of Four Hundred, which was in turn succeeded by a broader regime known as the Five Thousand before the full democracy was restored. The episode is important for three reasons: it shows that oligarchic sentiment existed and could organise; it shows that the fleet at Samos, manned by the poorer citizens, remained democratic and effectively constituted a rival Athens; and it establishes the precedent for what happened in 404, when defeat brought the narrow oligarchy of the Thirty, installed with Spartan backing.

The Thirty ruled by terror. Their brief regime executed large numbers of citizens and metics and drove others into exile, until the exiles organised, fought their way back and restored the democracy in 403. The restoration was accompanied by an amnesty covering acts committed before it, an unusual and deliberate act of political closure intended to prevent endless prosecution. That amnesty is essential background to what followed, because it meant that grievances arising from the years of oligarchy could not be pursued directly in the courts.

Socrates was tried in 399 on charges of not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledged, of introducing new divinities, and of corrupting the young; he was convicted and executed by hemlock. Explaining the verdict requires bringing several strands together. Religious offence was a public matter and had been treated with severity since 415. Socrates was publicly associated - fairly or not - with men who had damaged the city: Alcibiades, who defected, and Critias, a leader of the Thirty. His practice of exposing the ignorance of prominent citizens had made enemies, and the comic tradition had long presented him as a dangerous intellectual. With the amnesty preventing direct prosecution for the oligarchy, a charge of impiety offered a legal route to a political grievance. Our accounts of the trial come from Plato and Xenophon, both devoted to him and both writing to defend his memory, so the prosecution's case must largely be inferred - a fact any strong answer will state.

The Periclean ideal and the wartime reality

Fig. 8Thucydides places the funeral oration immediately before the plague - an ordering that invites exactly this comparison.

Worked example

Weighing convergent causes

Assess the reasons for Socrates' condemnation in 399 BC.

Take the charges seriously
Begin with what the court was actually asked to decide: failure to acknowledge the city's gods, introduction of new divinities, and corruption of the young. In a community where cult and citizenship were the same thing, these were public offences, and the affairs of 415 had shown how seriously such matters were taken.
Add the political context
Athens in 399 had recently lost a war, endured two oligarchic coups and suffered under the Thirty. Socrates' known associates included Alcibiades, who had defected, and Critias, a leader of the Thirty. Guilt by association was available to a jury even where the amnesty prevented direct charges.
Add the personal
His method made enemies among precisely the sort of prominent citizens who sat on juries, and the comic tradition had spent a quarter of a century presenting him as an intellectual who taught men to argue their way out of obligations.
Weigh them
No single strand is sufficient: religious charges alone had not destroyed him in earlier decades; political suspicion alone could not be prosecuted after the amnesty. The condemnation is best explained as the convergence of a genuine religious charge with a political grievance that could not be brought openly.
Evaluate the evidence
Both Plato's and Xenophon's accounts are written to vindicate him; neither preserves the prosecution's argument except through his reply. This should be stated: the reasoning attributed to the jury is inference from context rather than testimony.

Result: A judgement built from converging causes, with an explicit statement of how the one-sidedness of the sources limits what can be established.

Typical mistakes

Presenting the trial as a simple case of a democracy silencing free thought, which ignores the religious framework and the political context.
Treating Plato's Apology as a neutral transcript of the proceedings.

Active revision

How far was the trial of Socrates political rather than religious? Write a conclusion of no more than five sentences that reaches a judgement.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

Key points

Using a hostile source constructively

Key points

Testing an ancient judgement

Key points

Analysing a monument as evidence

Key points

Handling the Socratic problem

Key points

Evaluating comedy as evidence

Key points

Weighing convergent causes

Sources

Greek Depth Study: Culture and Politics of Athens, c.460-399 BC

Key points

Using a hostile source constructively

Key points

Testing an ancient judgement

Key points

Analysing a monument as evidence

Key points

Handling the Socratic problem

Key points

Evaluating comedy as evidence

Key points

Weighing convergent causes

Sources